21Bet Bookie Review

21Bet only began offering online sports betting in early 2016, which very much makes them newcomers. Over that short span of time, however, they’ve been building up quite a reputation. Time will tell whether they’ll grow enough to join the elite sports betting behemoths, but they’re off to a fast start.

They’ve definitely been attacking the market with a vigour that you have to applaud. 21Bet have already landed a big sponsorship deal with Championship side Wolves, and they’ve launched a whole series of aggressive offers to lure in new customers.

If you’re a sports gambler and you hadn’t heard of them before, then 21Bet need to be firmly on your radar.

21Bet Welcome Offer

We mentioned 21Bet had some aggressive offers. Well, they don’t get much more aggressive than offering you free weekly bets… for your entire life!

Of course, the ‘Free Bet Forever Welcome Offer’ is designed to be deliberately eye-catching. When you get down into the details, however, it isn’t quite so appealing. Here are the main T’s & C’s:

The value of each free bet is £10

To claim your first free bet you must place a minimum of 5 bets, valued at £10 or more, with odds of evens or greater

The initial five bets must be placed within seven days of signing up

From that point forward, you must place at least 10 bets per week, each with the same restrictions, to earn your £10 free bet

The offer only lasts for as long as you keep the run going: if you don’t place enough bets one week, and the chain is broken, the offer comes to an end

As we see it, there are two ways to look at this: as a one-off signup offer, and as an ‘offer for life’.

If you view it as the former, it’s actually a reasonable deal. You can place five bets of only £10, at relatively good odds, and immediately get a £10 free bet in return.

The whole ‘offer for life’ thing, however, seems very much like a marketing gimmick. Having to bet at least £100 per week just to get a £10 free bet back isn’t smart, and it’s obviously unreasonable to expect someone to keep doing that week after week, month after month, without breaking the chain.

If you generally bet around £100 per week anyway, then it’s a fine offer for you. If you’re a more casual gambler, there are far better signup offers out there.

21Bet Promotions

21Bet’s aggressive campaign to gain customers continues with its ongoing promotions, which are – thankfully – better than their signup offer. The page that contains their promotions is absolutely stuffed with good offerings. You’ll find many of them elsewhere on other sport betting sites, but you don’t usually get so many of them together with one bookie.

Among the current highlights is the Acca Insurance Offer; a favourite of football fans across the nation. 21Bet’s version is fairly standard: you need at least 5 selections in your accumulator, and if only one fails you can get up to £25 back. They also have an ongoing ‘refer a friend’ offer: if someone signs up on your recommendation, and gets through three weeks of the signup offer, you get a £10 free bet.

21Bet also offer a good range of promotions on big, specific events. At the time of writing, both Royal Ascot and the Confederations Cup are in progress, and 21Bet have dedicated offers to cover both of them.

Finally, 21Bet are currently displaying their creative side with the fantastic ‘Pick Your Promo’ offer. They’re inviting customers to come up with their idea for a promotion, and offering £100 for what they judge to be the best one. This kind of fun, light-hearted side isn’t always on display in the world of online betting (Paddy Power aside), and it’s refreshing to see.

21Bet Mobile Betting

At the time of writing, the 21Bet mobile app is only available on iOS. If you own an Android device, well… you’re out of luck. Considering the company have already been around for over a year, and considering we live in a time when so many people like to do their gambling on the move, it’s surprising that so many of their customers should be neglected in this way. If you like to bet on your phone, and it’s Android-based, you’ll have to use the mobile site (which does, admittedly, scale very well).

Our usage of the app on an iPhone didn’t throw up any problems, and it follows the same clean, crisp interface as the desktop version. Extra features like live streaming would have been nice, but can’t be expected from such a new company. Mobile-only offers would have been a more reasonable expectation, but they’re also absent. The app currently has very few ratings on the App Store, so we wouldn’t like to speak for its wider reliability.

21Bet Betting Options

There’s no doubting where 21Bet’s focus lies, with more ongoing promotions and specific markets available for betting on football than any other sport. If your betting focus is squarely on football, then you’re well-covered here.

That being said, they do offer over 20 different sports on which you can wager. That’s not an overwhelming number compared to some of the bigger betting outfits, but all of the heavy-hitters are included: tennis, horseracing, darts, American football, basketball, and so on. A few more niche sports (by British standards) are also represented, including handball and Aussie Rules.

About 21Bet

While 21Bet is a very new brand, they do have some experience on hand. Their sportsbook website – as well as their casino offerings – were both created by FSB Technology, an experienced company who’ve worked with the likes of Dafabet, one of Asia’s biggest gambling sites.

With a new company, trustworthiness is always an issue. When you sign up to the likes of Ladbrokes, you can assume you’ll be well looked after. When it’s a company you haven’t heard of – as 21Bet will be for many people – you’re likely to be more cautious. You needn’t worry on this count, however. 21Bet have all the registrations and verifications you could wish for, including full licensing and regulation from the UK’s Gambling Commission.

21Bet Bottom Line

More competition in any market is a good thing, and online sports betting is no different. We want smaller, new companies to come up and succeed, both so that customers have more options on who to bet with, and so that the industry titans have to up their game.

Right now, however, we can’t say that 21Bet’s offering has blown us away. It’s easy to see how they’ve made a splash, with a flashy signup offer, a raft of ongoing promotions, and smart sponsorship. Look a bit deeper, however, and there’s little there to make switching to them from another brand, or signing up with them as your first company, worthwhile.

The promotions aren’t quite tempting enough, and there are a number of signs that this is still a fledgling company: there’s no phone option for customer service, there’s no live streaming, and there’s the baffling lack of an Android app.

If you want to go ahead and try them out anyway, we won’t stop you! To sign up for their Free Bet Forever Welcome Offe